The Lore of the Honey-Bee

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler
TICKNER EDWARDES
AUTHOR OF “THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW”
WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS
THIRD EDITION
METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BRITISH BEE-KEEPERS’ ASSOCIATION, THOMAS WILLIAM COWAN, F.L.S., ETC., TO WHOSE LABOURS AND RESEARCHES THE WRITER, AND ALL OTHER BEE-KEEPERS, ARE UNDER A LASTING OBLIGATION.
One of the oldest and prettiest fables in ancient mythology is that which deals with the origin of the honey-bee. It was to Melissa and her sister Amalthea, the beautiful daughters of the King of Crete, that the god Jupiter was entrusted by his mother Ops, when Saturn, his father—following his custom of devouring his children at birth—sought to make the usual meal of this, his latest offspring.
The story is variously rendered by ancient writers. Some say that bees already existed in the world, and that Amalthea was only a goat, whose milk served to nourish the baby-god, in addition to the honey that Melissa obtained from the wild bees in the cave where Jupiter lay hidden. Another account has it that the bees themselves were drawn to his place of concealment by the noise made by his nurses, who beat continually on brazen pans to keep the sound of his infant lamentations from the ears of his ravening sire. Thenceforward the bees took over the charge of him, bringing him daily rations of honey until he grew up and was able to hold his own in the Olympian theogony. In either case Jupiter showed his gratitude towards his preservers in true celestial fashion. It was a very ancient belief among the earliest writers that, in the single instance of the honey-bee, the ordinary male-and-female principle was abrogated, and that the propagation of the species took place by miraculous means. In explanation of this, we are told it was a special gift from Jupiter in acknowledgment of the unique service rendered him. In one version of the fable, and in the words of a famous bee-master who wrote in 1657, “Jupiter, for so great a benefit, bestowed on his nurses for a reward that they should have young ones, and continue their kind, without wasting themselves in venery.” In the other, and probably much older form of the legend, Melissa, the beautiful Princess of Crete, was herself changed by the god into a bee, with the like immaculate propensities; and thenceforward the work of collecting honey for the food of man—that honey which, down to a very few centuries from the present time, was universally believed to be a miraculous secretion from heaven—was confided to her descendants.